


Burn

by Safiyabat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Demon Dean Winchester, Episode Tag - Do You Believe In Miracles, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, mentions of Dean Winchester - Freeform, mentions of John Winchester - Freeform, mentions of Michael - Freeform, mentions of adam, mentions of lucifer, mentions of the cage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-30
Updated: 2014-05-30
Packaged: 2018-01-27 03:05:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1712648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Safiyabat/pseuds/Safiyabat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After discovering that Dean is now a demon Sam decides to hold a funeral.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burn

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for depression, grief, and fire. 
> 
> This is my contribution to the Bitter Sam!Girls Club June Fanwork Challenge. The theme for June is Sam + Fire.
> 
> Supernatural and the characters from the show are not my property. I make no money from this or any other work of fan fiction.

First Sam collected firewood. Kindling and tinder were easy to find nearby, and what did it say about their lives that they actually had a stockpile in the bunker just waiting for the next pyre? Getting logs sized appropriately for what he had in mind was the next part of the plan. They had some. They had enough for one human-sized pyre, one Sam-sized pyre to be specific because the youngest Winchester took pains to leave that subtle hint. This time of course there was no body to burn, but he needed to get the right temperature to burn off all of the gasses and unpleasant smells that would be released when he torched some of what he planned to light up tonight.

Maybe it was stupid. He’d taken a class once, part of the theology major he hadn’t told anyone about. (They’d had enough trouble wrapping their heads around pre-law.) The class had been around rituals in religion and culture and the professor had this obsession with funerary rites. Sam hadn’t seen a huge problem with this given his background. People who had sex outside of marriage might face societal punishment if they were caught but the lack of ritual itself rarely caused a problem only others’ cognizance of it. Sam himself had never had a funeral, never been properly laid to rest. No rest for the wicked indeed. Dean had, of course. They’d buried him in Pontiac, Illinois for reasons that had probably seemed significant at the time with a proper wooden cross and everything – even a coffin. Sam had washed his body tenderly and stitched the wounds left behind by the hellhounds, and then he’d laid him to rest in that coffin and gone out to find a way to spring Dean from Hell or die trying. 

The point of course was that pretty much all cultures had some sort of leave-taking ritual when it came to their dead, some way of formalizing for the living that this chapter of their lives was closed. Even hunters did this. They wrapped the deceased in a shroud – usually a nasty old motel sheet, but a white sheet was best if you could get it. The body would be salted and then burned while the hunting partner and anyone who knew and respected the guy – no one liked other hunters, apparently, except Garth – watched until the body was consumed to ash. Then the fire would go out and people would go drink until they couldn’t remember that they were supposed to be sad instead of belligerent and then they would pass out.

It was what Dean would have expected, except for the whole part where he would have expected to be resurrected at all costs. Only now there was nothing to resurrect. Dean was gone, and in his place a Knight of Hell with his skin.

*

_“Pastor Jim?” the boy asked._

_“Yes, Sam?” The priest gave him a fond smile._

_“Why do hunters always cremate their dead?” They’d just gotten back from burning the mortal remains of Connor Roth, a hunter John knew down in Mississippi. John had hauled the corpse back up to Minnesota in the back of the Impala wrapped in an old, torn tarp and they’d salted and burned his bones in the park behind the church after dark. Afterwards John and Caleb and even Bobby Singer went to go drink heavily, joined by Dean. “Other people bury their dead. Hunters burn theirs. Why?”_

_Jim sighed, turning to face the boy. “Well, when we burn a ghost’s bones what happens, Sam?”_

_“The spirit is released to wherever it was going to go before it became a ghost,” he replied promptly._

_“Right. So that’s part of the reason. No hunter wants to wind up as the hunted – no one wants to become a monster. Right?”_

_The boy swallowed, hard. “What if they didn’t choose to?” He licked his lips._

_“Well, that’s just it. No one chooses to be a monster. By cremating a hunter we’re helping to make sure that they don’t become one. It’s a kindness, a favor to them.”_

_“If it’s such a kindness to them then why do the ghosts fight us so hard?”_

_The clergyman grimaced. “Everyone has a survival instinct. Most everyone, anyway. I think once they realize that they’re hurting the things they loved in life, they’re more willing. But we don’t usually have hunters stuck in the Veil anyway. It’s a precaution. “I think part of it, too, is the idea that fire cleanses.”_

_Sam blinked. “Cleanses?”_

“The idea used to be that you could clean something – purify it – with fire.” He shrugged. “We get mired into an awful lot of evil. I suppose that the tradition comes from the hope that we could get rid of the evil that’s touched us.” 

_The eleven-year-old shuddered. “I don’t want to burn, Pastor Jim.”_

*

Sam then went through the bunker and collected what he needed. He had no body to burn, but Dean’s memory foam mattress would suffice. The Dean-shaped coating of sulfur dust didn’t come loose as Sam carried the bulky foam block through the halls and up the stairs which probably counted as a miracle. He laid it on the top of the pyre where the body would go. Other things needed to be added too. With no actual person to mourn, no physical presence, he had to go with emotional ties. Dean had been proud of his record collection but it was relatively new. Most of his old tee shirts were long since gone. Clothes didn’t tend to last long in their profession. 

Deep in the depths of Dean’s closet, though, Sam found an old hoodie of his that Dean had stolen when he’d been dying all those years ago, back in Nebraska after that rawhead hunt gone awry. Deeper in the depths of Dean’s room – seriously, when had the guy found the time to accumulate all this crap? – he found a few more things. He found an old Vonnegut paperback, with the cover disintegrated right off. The notes in the margins were pure Dean. So was the little sketch of a dick in the bottom left corner of the title page. He couldn’t help but chuckle. Yeah, this was perfect.

He found an old mix tape he’d made Dean once, about a million years ago. He’d thrown in a few more modern songs in a vain attempt to convince his brother that not everything produced after 1988 was emblematic of the decline and fall of America, but he’d never actually heard Dean listen to it. Here it was, though, lugged from place to place and transferred lovingly through all of the Impala’s rebuilds so it was still here even with Soundgarden sharing space with ELO. He brought it out.

There was a photo – Dean and his mother. Funny how Sam had never been able to look at that picture and think of her as their mother. Well, maybe not funny. Mary had never belonged to his life, it had never been allowed. She was good and pure, demon deal notwithstanding, and his life was not for good and pure things. Dean – if he were Dean and not the void that he now was – would not welcome profane hands handling this precious photo. He’d kept it next to his nightstand angled toward his bed where even Sam couldn’t look directly at it. Sam carefully covered his hands with his shirtsleeves and added it to the pages of the book. It was part of Dean. It would stand in for him at his funeral. 

*

_He burned. Sometimes he burned for days, sometimes for weeks, sometimes just for a few hours. Michael lacked creativity. It was like someone had told him that Hell was supposed to burn sinners so that was how he amused himself – burning Sam, burning Lucifer, sometimes burning Adam if Adam’s gibbering got to be too much for him. Of course he couldn’t do much to Lucifer beyond annoying him. He’d been able to burn Anna to a crisp right before Dean’s eyes or so Dean had told him – he’d been dead again – but Lucifer was a different matter entirely. He mostly did it when Lucifer was monopolizing “the toy,” which he admittedly had a tendency to do. Sam was his after all._

_Eventually Lucifer taught Michael that there were other ways to hurt Sam, although he never did manage to educate the other angel on the finer points of mental torture. Michael, like his True Vessel, was a creature of immediate physical action. Instant gratification, that was his thing, so even with the more varied tortures Michael always stuck with the physical and he always eventually came back to burning. It was kind of like his default setting._

_And at the end of the day (week, century, millennium) Sam kind of preferred it. He knew why he was here. He was indeed made for Lucifer, and something that was made for Lucifer had to be about as sinful as sin itself. He’d done awful things. He’d had to jump, both to save the world from Lucifer and to save it from the stain that was Sam Winchester. There was only one way to purify a foulness that ran as deep as Sam’s. It wasn’t through intricate psychological torments. It wasn’t through ice, and it wasn’t through delicate use of a blade._

_It was through fire._

*

Sam himself didn’t have a lot of stuff. Well, he didn’t have any stuff. He had some clothes, which were destroyed on roughly a monthly basis and replaced on the same schedule. He had his laptop, whose files he now backed up onto a memory stick that disappeared into his pocket. He made himself some new fake IDs, choosing names off baseball rosters and creating the necessary documentation. He packed some of the Men of Letters’ most useful books, as much as could fit into saddlebags anyway.

He had his own journal, such as it was. He’d stopped writing in it when he realized Dean was reading it, looking for evidence one way or another after Dad died. He had an old blanket from the apartment he’d shared with Jess – one of a very few things he’d managed to salvage from the shell of that place. He had Dad’s journal. That wasn’t his of course, but it mentioned him often enough or things connected to him that he felt justified in including it. 

He had his Stanford acceptance letter. Talk about crap he’d lugged around all these years… It had been one of the few things he’d stashed away in secret little spaces in the Impala before jumping into the Cage, Dean never suspecting a thing out of place. He slipped that into the journal. He’d been so proud of that accomplishment. Still was, honestly. Let others (Dean and John and Bobby and whoever) say what they wanted about how he’d abandoned their family and all of the people who allegedly needed him – that had been a load of crap and he’d known it and they’d known it. He’d accomplished something pretty amazing – getting a full-ride scholarship to a top-tier institution was nothing to sneer at for a normal kid, never mind one who lived the way they did.

He had The Ring. Yeah, that ring. The one he’d been hauling around since October of 2005, the one he’d planned to give to Jess and hadn’t managed to find the right time to offer to her. It wouldn’t have mattered much in the great scheme of things – she’d have still been killed, killed because Sam loved her and for no other reason. Because Azazel wanted Sam on the road and wanted him grieving. Still, she’d have known his intentions. He’d have been able to introduce her to Dean as his future sister-in-law instead of just as his girlfriend. Maybe then he wouldn’t have been – 

Well, no point in might-have-beens. He pocketed the ring. One more item made it into the pocket – jewelry was too easily lost. 

The last item he found was his original birth certificate. Technically he was already legally dead, thanks to the Leviathan at the FBI and such. He’d already erased his and Dean’s fingerprints from the national databases long before Dean had asked Charlie to do it – it wasn’t like he needed to be told to do so, seriously. But the birth certificate – it was another of those things that he’d been lugging around forever, the last thing to link him to the innocent infant he’d once been. Mary had once touched it. It was the only piece of evidence that connected him to her at all. He slipped it into the journal too. 

*

_“Pastor Jim?”_

_“Yes, Sam?”_

_“Why do we stand there and watch until everything burns?” This was another of those questions he couldn’t ask Dad. Dad wouldn’t answer. He’d get mad at him for asking in the first place. And he couldn’t ask Dean. Dean would tell him not to think so hard about things like that, it was just what they did._

_Pastor Jim was different. Pastor Jim was always patient with him, even when he wanted to know stupid things. “It makes us feel like the deceased is less alone,” he said after a somber moment. “We feel like we’re there with him, even though he’s not really there. And of course, we’re there to make sure that the job is really done, that nothing comes along and tries to disrupt the proceedings. All sorts of creatures might like to disrupt the natural order, Sam. Our job as hunters is to uphold the natural order. What’s dead should stay dead.”_

_“But –“_

_“That’s very important, Sam,” Jim reiterated, kneeling down to look him in the eye. “Never forget that.”_

*

Sam wheeled the motorbike out of the bunker. It hurt a little to see the Impala like that, up on blocks, but he couldn’t bear the thought of her rims bending as her tires slowly deflated. Then he sealed up the bunker. The Men of Letters had warded it and warded it well but not well enough. Crowley could be summoned into it, for example. And Gadreel could walk right in as though he’d owned the place. Sam, before choosing this course of action, had created new wards. Now he activated them. No angel was getting inside, and no demon either. Not even a human could crack the seal. A person would need traces of the divine and the infernal as well as the mundane to have a hope of getting inside. Then, of course, they’d need to have the key. 

Only one person in existence, to the best of Sam’s knowledge, had all four of those facets.

He made his way to the pyre with his stack of ephemera. If their lives were supposed to be represented by the things they left behind then there hadn’t been much to call “life” to them. A couple of books, a few pieces of paper. A freaking ring that hadn’t ever even been offered – who was to say she’d have even said yes to a kid with no family and more secrets than money to his name? A mattress. A friggin’ mattress where a person should be. 

Only he shouldn’t be, because he shouldn’t be dead. Except he is. Damn it. 

He lit the pyre at the four compass points. He didn’t do it that way for any particular ritual reason, just because he wanted to be thorough and compass points seemed to offer as good a sense of order as anything. The dry tinder and went up immediately, then the kindling. It didn’t take long to catch the mattress. Memory foam is of course treated with fire retardant, but Sam’s pyre was very generous and of course the mattress was right on top. It caught, burning bright and hot in a matter of minutes. 

He reached into his pocket and clenched his fist around the amulet. It was time. He’d fished it out of the garbage years ago. Like the Stanford acceptance letter he’d hidden it in the secret places of the Impala before he jumped. Like the ring, he’d been waiting for the right time to return it to Dean. The right time had never presented itself and now it was too late, too late. Always too late. Would it have ever been the right time? He’d given it to Dean as a sign of his faith in him, his love for him. Dean put it in the trash. Now Dean was gone, there was no way to know. 

He lobbed it into the center of the pyre and watched as the brass reddened and then slowly melted away. 

He stood alone beside the fire, trying not to breathe the toxic smoke as it burned down to coals. He might have shed a few tears. It wasn’t as though there was anyone to see him, anyone to care. He didn’t have a body to burn, but there had been something left of Dean to perform the appropriate obsequies for. He’d done his duty. He’d given Dean a hunter’s funeral. 

He’d given himself one too. He’d seen everything that was left of Sam Winchester – except the body – consumed to ash. By the time that the last of the glowing embers faded into gray ash his tears had dried and the sun had risen. 

Derek Hayes walked toward his motorcycle and started driving west.


End file.
